


A Spell of Time

by J_C_D



Series: Kannadi Albedo [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Canon Compliant, During Canon, Gen, Magic Physics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:13:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29518593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/J_C_D/pseuds/J_C_D
Summary: Kannadi receives a time-sensitive request from her grandmother.[Somewhere in the background of the main story arc of A Realm Reborn. Origin of an alt character.]
Series: Kannadi Albedo [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2168502
Kudos: 2





	A Spell of Time

The news spread all the faster for being unbelievable.

Long-former Syndicate member Kharon Albedo, née Cwaenwyb Helbyrtwyn, alias Lady Pine, alias the Silver Giant, alias That Bedamned Royalist (an appellation from Lord Lolorito) – the one-quarter-Sea-Wolf who moved like a shark through Ul’dahn financial circles, survived the Calamity and prevented the total collapse of her family’s wealth – lay dying.

Kannadi, her only granddaughter, found it impossible. She continued to find it impossible as she ran down the avenue, having dropped her shopping at the news through her family linkshell. She remained firm that it was impossible as she barreled through the crowd.

Kannadi had barely been back from the disaster of the dawn of the Seventh Umbral Era for two weeks. Her old and broken yet comfortable world had been broken further, and she was in no fit state to lose more.

Her utmost conviction in the outright impossibility of what she had heard only grew as she slammed into the lift, shouted something incendiary at the attendant and rode to Ul’dah’s upper level. And so, adamantine in her confidence that her cousin the doctor was wholly, totally, completely and utterly mistaken and furthermore due a slap about the ear for telling her such lies about her beloved grandmother, Kannadi stormed into the Phrontistery.

Her monolithic certainty collapsed into sand when she saw the eighty-seven-year-old giantess lying prone on a bed barely big enough in a room that seemed to expand with the speed of horror.

Kannadi had seen a few faces that she could describe as “ashen.” Most were on zombies. Kharon’s was nearly there, pale and drawn and slack. _Slack_ was what struck Kannadi: her grandmother was always poised, always alert, always at most an ilm away from predatory tension. Not like this limp thing with its hand being held by its eldest son.

Kannadi tried to ask her father what happened, but the roughness in her throat from running had laced itself shut in horrified shock. Her eyes – so much like her grandmother’s – shot the query anyway.

“Heart attack,” said Torrent, with effort. The laugh lines on his rugged face lay flat. Kannadi heard roughness in his throat too.

Doctor Rasim Albedo, Kannadi’s eldest cousin yet young in his thirties, had a better grip on himself. “I’m given to understand that she was moving her firing range targets by herself,” he said from his wheelchair. His body ended at the knees, the legacy of Dalamud’s immense shrapnel. “Heavy things, each one. One of her attendants heard her collapse. That was close to two hours ago.”

“She’ll recover,” Kannadi insisted, her self-control dancing atop a landslide in her head.

Torrent kept hold of his mother’s hand as he looked at his daughter. The look was enough. Kanandi’s throat shut again.

“She was able to speak not long ago,” Rasim said, wheeling himself closer to his cousin. “She asked for you the second I was about to call.”

“What else?” Kannadi squeaked.

“Nothing else. I rather hoped your presence would rouse her again.”

Kannadi drifted to her grandmother’s side. Her father said not a word. She fished under the bedsheet and took her grandmother’s other hand.

“Grandmother?” she asked.

Kharon’s eyes slit open, checked her surroundings and shut again. “Who else is present,” she demanded in a sigh without a question mark.

“Just me, Kanna and Rasim,” said her son.

“Door?”

“Closed, Mom.”

“Lock it.”

“Yes, Mom.”

Torrent rose and hurried to the door. Kharon rubbed her hand on the top sheet.

“And stop panicking,” the matriarch said, her tone slowed by a weakness Kannadi could tell she hated. “Your hands sweat.”

“Sorry Mom.” Torrent locked the door.

It wasn’t an expensive hospital room, not like the one that was nearly a hotel suite when Kannadi broke her arm in her youth. It was functional. Kharon had gotten big on efficient functionality since the family finances took a Dalamud-sized hit. The fact that she was still richer than most could ever hope to dream of was a detail easily ignored.

“Kannadi,” said the old woman. “I am dying.”

“Everyone is, Grandmother,” said Kannadi, who tried to smile.

“Then I may beat them to it.”

Kharon squeezed her granddaughter’s hand. Torrent knelt on the opposite side of the bed and Kannadi knelt with him, shoving aside shame that she hadn’t done so already. Kharon breathed deep and regained a small measure of her characteristic tension. Kannadi was glad to see it, but noticed her cousin’s professional concern and her father’s filial worry.

“I keep informed,” Kharon said. “Your father. My retainers. Old contacts. They tell me there are things newly recovered from Allagan ruins in Mor Dhona that can turn back the flow of time.”

Several emotions ran so fast to the top of Kannadi’s mind that they collided and clanged out dozens of thoughts. _No, Grandmother, they don’t work on living things. No, Grandmother, that’s just allegorical, they’re simply maintenance materials. No, Grandmother, don’t be so damned soppy about this, you’re stronger than that…_

Kharon continued, “Not that I expect them to be safe. I’ve heard about that adventurer who drank that so-called Oil of Time. All he got for his trouble was…” her eyebrows knitted. “What did you call it, Rasim dear?”

“Acute gastroenteritis characterized by frequent combustive paroxysm.”

Kannadi’s jaw dropped in spite of herself. “What, _actual_ combustion?”

“I’m given to understand the flames were green,” said her cousin with the straightest face she had ever seen.

“And there was that other man,” Kharon went on, “who purchased a handful of so-called Sands of Time and baked it into cookies to make it easier to eat.”

“Gastroenteritis again,” Rasim nodded. “Though it concluded in a new malady I had no choice but to call Dramatic Osteoporosis. He ended up vomiting far more granular mineral than he ingested.”

“And yet on materials of ancient make, these substances work miracles,” said Kharon.

“Likely a trait of the original pieces and not the maintenance substance,” Kannadi said quickly. “They’re made of something that responds only in the presence of these Oils and Sands.”

“Yes,” Kharon turned her face to her granddaughter, “and they respond with _creation_. Not repair, _renewal_. Holes _filled_ , not patched, tears _unified_ , not stitched, thinness made _thick_ , not layered.”

“They don’t work on living matter,” Kannadi said as kindly as she wished and as sternly as she dared.

Kharon grabbed a fistful of Kannadi’s tunic collar. The old woman’s gaze was horrible: desperation mixed with stubborn strength and spun like candyfloss around solid fear.

“ _Then make them_. You study things? Study this. You solve problems? Solve this. Examine what makes those substances work, then _make it work on flesh_.”

“Grandmother…”

Kharon turned her head to stare at the ceiling.

She wept.

Kannadi had never seen it happen. Judging by the look on her father’s face, neither had he.

“I do not want to die.”

With her surge of energy spent, Kharon’s face slackened again.

Kannadi’s hand flew to her grandmother’s neck and bumped into her father’s fingertips, already there. A pulse remained. Both of them sighed.

“Well?” Torrent stared hopefully over his mother.

“Father, what she asks is…”

“Entirely reasonable,” Rasim said, wiping his spectacles.

“Oh come now, cousin, you’re a chirurgeon!”

Rasim fitted his glasses back on. They shone to occlude his eyes.

“She started her command with ‘study this,’ Kannadi. So study. If the rest of it turns out impossible, then so be it, but do not refuse to do _what you can_.”

Kannadi blinked at her cousin. He had witnessed a flaming stone from Dalamud kill his parents, and then witnessed the tower they were in come [crashing down upon his legs](http://www.finalfantasyxiv.com/anniversary/na/detail/memoir_2.html), yet he still had the wherewithal to stop the bleeding and save himself.

_He ought to know something about what one can do._

Kannadi comforted her father and left the room some time later when it became clear that Kharon had nothing more to say.

She walked in thought, apologized to the lift operator, and passed another parade.

_Study, eh?_

She had already subjected her own samples of Oil and Sand allegedly-of-Time to analysis, for her own curiosity, and had hit enough dead ends that she had set well aside the question of how they worked. Nothing seemed to pierce their mystery, no matter what manner of test she tried. Sunlight exposure, chemical exposure, aether exposure, no answer came clear through the microscopes…

Microscopes. _Ah-ha…_

Expensive things, yes, but only bits of metal and bent glass. Common materials, regardless of the price for quality. But these weren’t common things her grandmother wanted studied. Perhaps the problem was one of equipment…

How long could the old Silver Giant hold out?

Kannadi raced to her apartment, her mind spinning with apparatus designs.

#

Kannadi Albedo, age seven, poured a cup of invisible tea for her guests.

“It’s a special tea I got from the Sultana,” she lied creatively. “It’s her very favorite and she only let me have it ‘cause her chocobo was sick and I made it feel better.”

She scooted the cup towards a plush chocobo sitting on a cushion opposite her. The little hardwood table between them was tiled black and white on top.

“It’s real good, Alcibiades, take a sip.”

Alcibiades gave the cup a glassy stare.

Kannadi reached her bare foot under the table, grabbed the plush bird’s leg with her toes and tilted him. Alcibiades toppled forward and his beak plunged into the cup.

“There, you see? Isn’t it good?” The hostess sipped from her own cup, a gold-rimmed floral-painted porcelain treasure which had no business in the hands of a seven-year-old. She cast a practiced glower over another guest at the table. “I don’t know why you don’t like it, Mister Salad.”

A solid jadeite statuette of a peiste stood on the table and hovered its hooded head over a cup. Mister Salad had an estimated value of just over nine hundred fifty thousand gil, but was never so busy that he missed a teatime.

“He’s just im- _possible_ , isn’t he, Alcibiades?” Kannadi shook her head. “He won’t even try it. He’s so rude.”

Mister Salad’s permanently open mouth caught a passing mote of dust.

“Oh, well why didn’t you _say_ so?” Kannadi smiled. “You know we have plenty. Could you pass the sugar, Grandmother?”

Kharon sat cross-legged on her cushion like a mountain, daintily holding an empty four-figure teacup in the same hand that had written men’s death warrants. Kannadi knew her only as the biggest, kindest playmate in the world.

“Certainly,” she said, and scooted a bowl full of white cubes toward her granddaughter. Mister Salad’s cup quickly mounded with sugar cubes. “So how did you cure the chocobo?”

“Huh?”

“The Sultana’s.”

“Oh, oh. Well!” Kannadi took another sip of air. “What happened was, he ate the wrong kinda greens. They were the Super Poisonous Gysahl Greens! So the Sultana came to me and said—” with a high, noble drawl, evidently— “oh Miss Albedo, please help! My dear sweet Lord Maplefeathers is so very sick!”

“Goodness.” Kharon sipped her imaginary tea. “What ever did you do?”

“Well…” Kannadi looked pressed, for just a moment. “I, uhm, I had to talk to an esspert! So I did! Alcibiades was glad to help ‘cause he’s a bird too, so he knows all about everything about chocobos.”

Alcibiades remained beak-first in his cup, glassily regarding his surroundings.

“He said,” Kannadi continued in as low and therefore boyish a voice as she could manage, “’Kannadi! You must go to the mountains of Coerthas and find the Remedy Flower to cure Lord Maplefeathers!’ So I did.”

“All by yourself?” Kharon raised a graying eyebrow.

“Well no, of course not. I took Mister Salad ‘cause he’s from Coerthas.” Kannadi took the peiste from his place at the table and bounced him lightly in front of her grandmother, coming dangerously close to breaking his meticulously-carved claws. “So I rode on his back and we went to Coerthas and saw the mountains and the spine trees—”

“Pine trees.”

“Pine trees, and took a swim in the rivers and it was really cold ‘cause the rivers there are made of ice water, you know, so after we swam I started looking for the flower and there was this, this squirrel, and he was holding a Remedy Flower, so I asked him may I please have it and he said no because his mommy was sick, but he was real nice and he led me and Mister Salad to this _hyuuge_ field of flowers!”

“Huge, was it?”

“ _Hyuuge!_ ” Kannadi gestured wide, swinging a million gil worth of jade statuette by its hind leg. Her gesture bumped Alcibiades and he tipped over, teacup and all. “There was, like, every kind of flower in the world! Real-life flowers in all the colors ever. Oh, and there was like a million Remedy Flowers. A million bazillion.”

“That many? Oh my.”

Kannadi’s youthful excitement built with her own narration. She interrupted herself occasionally with carried-away gasps like sharp hiccups.

“So we went there,” gasp, “and Mister Salad helped me pick a bunch of the Remedy Flowers ‘cause he has big claws,” gasp, “but we left a lot behind so the squirrel and everybody else can use them okay and so then we came back and gave them to the Sultana and she said,” gasp, “she said ‘Oh Miss Albedo, thank you so much! There are so many here, no chocobo anywhere will ever be sick again!’ So she cured Lord Maplefeathers and and she was so happy she gave me this tea and that’s how I got it.”

“Well!” Kharon looked at her empty cup as if it were full of jewels. “That sounds like quite an adventure.”

Kannadi bit her lip and picked her feet under the table. She glanced at Alcibiades, still vacantly enjoying his tea despite the cup being sideways, and whispered to her grandmother behind her hand: “I didn’t really avenshure. I made it all up.”

Kharon whispered back, behind a hand as hard as a garden spade: “That’s okay. One day you’ll grow up strong enough to bend the world to your will. Just like me.”

Kannadi continued to whisper. “Thank you.”

“Kannadi, dear?”

“What?”

“Why are we whispering?”

“’Cause Alcibiades doesn’t know I made it up.”

#

“You!” Shouted Kannadi, as adult as she was anxious. “Explain!”

The rhythm of hammer blows continued without pause, shaping cheap steel into yet another nearly-as-cheap kettle.

“Gonna hafta spessify,” Gerolt mumbled.

Kannadi strode up the steps to the master craftsman’s unbecoming excuse of an outdoor workspace. It was late in the day, and empty enough to risk angry volume.

“The Spira Condensate! How is it that the samples only exhibit integral resonance with _your_ peak output?!”

“The what now?” Gerolt’s eyes were red-rimmed. He looked miserable, in Kannadi’s estimation, though she preferred not to look at him too long in any case.

Kannadi drew a slow breath and ratcheted her diction down a few degrees of education.

“Allow me to start over. I am Kannadi Albedo, lately a researcher of certain aetheric matters. Are you with me so far?”

“What if I am?”

“Then you can explain a bewildering quandary— that is, a very odd and frustrating… thing… with certain items that you created.”

Gerolt continued hammering. “Look, lady,” he groaned, “I’m almost three days out from me last drink, I dunno if’n I’m in a shape for essplanations.”

“Would it help if I used small words?”

“Try it an’ let’s see.”

Kannadi crossed her arms. Just her luck that the man was somehow _less_ useful with sobriety.

“I built a thing,” Kannadi said, cringing at her own bluntness. “It let me see how aether moves in small things. That is very important. No one else has seen what I saw.”

“Good on yer.”

“Yes, quite. And what I saw was that the substances called Oil and Sands of Time are a variety of aetherostatic matter known as a Spira Condensate.”

“Slow ‘er down, luv.”

Kannadi grumbled through her nose.

With the help of some friends to gather rare materials, she had invented a crystal-powered viewing scope. It wasn’t a microscope, because microscopes bent light. It wasn’t an aetheroscope, because aetheroscopes converted invisible aether into light. Kannadi’s device did both: it _bent aether_ , allowing her to see the most subtle aether on a scale unknown to modern science. She called it a Manascope. It had revealed that Oil and Sands of Time were liquid and solid states of the same substance: an obscure kind of matter theorized by the ancient scholar Spira of Nym. It was aether forced into a shape that resembled a foam of rings, with each ring interacting only with itself, in sufficient density for physical manifestation.

Spira, however, had never guessed at what Kannadi had seen. Within those tiny hard-aether rings were traces of _moving_ aether, locked away like air bubbles in amber. The only possible way they could have gotten there was at the moment the Oil and Sands of Time were created: thousands of years ago.

It was baffling. She hated being baffled.

So, godsdamnit, she was going to wring answers out of that repulsive craftsman even if she had to sing her question in nursery-school rhyme.

“Aether wants to move,” she said, slowly. “Allagans could make it stop moving. And when it stopped, time got stuck in it. But it comes unstuck when worked into your old masterpieces. Now please tell me, Master Gerolt. _Why is that?_ ”

The sheet of bent bargain steel continued on its pounding journey to kettlehood, taking shape with each blow. Gerolt stared vacantly at it as his hands worked with artisanal precision. It was as though his seat of consciousness was in his hands, not his head.

“I used to be the best,” Gerolt eventually said.

“Quite so.”

“I put my heart and soul into them things. My _heart and soul_. I was proud of every last one. Like a father on a new son, aye?”

“Aye indeed.” Kannadi stepped closer. “And was there some special finishing process you used, some secret ingredient? I thought perhaps it might be something infused in the mark of Rhalgr…”

“Shut yer daft guessin’-hole, Professer.” Gerolt’s hammer blows rang louder. “I was the _best_. The best don’t put their heart and soul in the _gilding_. You wanna know how your Spittin’ Candleshite works? The best I can guess, the _best_ , is that stuff makes my old pieces remember when they was born. Back when I was their dear ol’ dad, sellin’ ‘em off to whatever godsdamned nobs won’t even look at me now.”

Kannadi stared into the middle distance, processing. Gerolt took it as a sign of waiting for more.

“Now bugger off,” he said, “less y’got a drink on yer.”

“I’ll pay ten thousand gil for that kettle you’re making,” Kannadi urgently offered.

Gerolt’s hammer flew from his hand on an upswing and concussed a squirrel in the nearest tree.

“Wha—?! Ten?!”

“Ten thousand! And put your heart and soul into it! Give it a father’s pride!”

#

Kannadi ran from Ul’dah’s aetheryte plaza to her apartment, clutching the fastest-finished kettle in history.

His heart and soul…

The problem with the Manascope was that nothing it saw was labeled. Oh, yes, Kannadi could see distinct lines and whorls of flowing aether in anything under the lens, but she had no frame of reference for what they were. What did this line do? What quality did that whorl carry? Why did this whorl disappear when that line intersected it?

Aetheromicroscopy was a whole new realm of science without a single textbook. She planned to write a few, but that could wait. Her entire endeavor of discovering how Oil and Sands of Time worked had a time limit that she dared not overshoot for reasons very personal indeed.

She needed a way to tell what to look for -- and Gerolt had provided it.

 _His heart and soul_. There was a word for pouring one’s soul into a piece of equipment, and that word was _spiritbond_.

The Manascope bent aether to see aether in objects. Spiritbond was just one of aether’s many possible forms. She had likely seen it already but couldn’t identify it.

The Manascope itself was a tube the length of her forearm. She fitted a fresh crystal at the top, closed the lid, and picked up Gerolt’s kettle. She abused the ten-thousand-gil kitchen implement with a goldsmith’s mallet until it was as ugly and dented as Gerolt’s social standing. After a noisy few minutes she balanced the mangled kettle awkwardly on a book to stick its flattened spout under the Manascope.

_His heart and soul…_

What did spiritbond look like?

Steel was naturally poor in aether, and so it was easy to pick out a thin silver-blue line in its aetheric composition. It was a pathetic little jagged hair compared to great river-strings of aether she had seen in other objects, but it was there.

Kannadi reached to a pair of jeweler’s tweezers and pinched a pinch of Sands of Time. She had watched Gerolt’s apprentice apply it before, and wondered how long it had taken him to learn. She understood it after the eighth wordless demonstration; all it really took was an intimate knowledge of heat transfer rates and focused pressure with good timing, depending on the specific strength and thaumic resistance of the material in question. Child’s play, to an observant craftsperson like her.

Under the Manascope, Kannadi applied the Sands to the sluggish aether of steel.

Far down at the scale where even a blood cell was a colossal island, the silver-blue line whipped and cracked apart the ring-structures of the Sands.

The kettle instantly reshaped itself to perfection with a neat _clang_.

She filled that night with experiments. She filled the next day and night as well. She subjected everything she wore in the field to the Manascope’s scrutiny and compared everything she saw, _everything_ , for commonality. Her eyes picked and followed threads from knotted bramble-tangles of aetheric lifestuff as her hands almost independently scrawled esoteric arcs and formulas out of her field of view. Her mind burned like a forge, but her treacherous stomach demanded filling or else it would break her threads of thought. Even when she marched muttering to her kitchen to shove down fuel without tasting it, she pondered arcane mathematics and logical puzzles completely without precedent.

It was like flying. She never knew she had such capacity, such intellectual stamina. She had been a fine academic indeed, and knew well the indulgent flavors of hyperfocus, but this was new. She heard the widening of her horizons. She felt the stretch of truth to fill them. She thought without consciousness, observing and calculating and pondering the echoes of her conclusions in order to shape them into new hypotheses.

The ability was worthy of scrutiny in itself. Later, perhaps. There was work to do.

On the third morning, Kannadi stared at the Manascope from across her study. Her eyelids were purpled, her posture defiant. She hadn’t slept. Why would she? There was work to do. So in lieu of sleeping, she shot dark looks at her device for daring to give her a conclusion that made no sense.

_Damn that craftsman!_

Kannadi had crafted many things of her own, but even after learning the shape of her own spiritbond – an impossible sky color with a wave shape like _this,_ and between _this_ and _that_ number of kinks but only at _this_ interval provided that it branched after no more than _this_ many waves – she never detected it in anything new that she made. Gerolt, that muttering lush, was somehow gifted with the ability to imbue his completed works with his spirit _as it was at a specific moment_ \-- and those samples of Allagan ingenuity reacted to it alone, pulling back the whole work _to_ that moment.

It was a skill she lacked.

Kannadi’s fingernails dug into her crossed arms as she thought as hard as she’d ever thought before.

If the Oil and Sands trapped aether from thousands of years ago, why would it travel _back_ once liberated? What, was it homesick? And why would it drag a masterwork back only so far? Why stop at Gerolt’s moment of spiritbond, why not reduce it to raw ore and thread and so on? Anyway, the very premise was absurd! Aether didn’t leave a – a _time stamp!_

Did it?

Didn’t it?

_Could it?_

_Why couldn’t it?_

Kannadi blinked for only the fifth time in the past hour.

“Time isn’t a thing,” she said aloud. “It’s a record.”

She said the words to hear how they sounded, taste how they tasted. Finding nothing offensive in them, she spoke again.

“Allagan science could sequester aether from the flow of time. A record of the past. Like words in a journal.”

The silence offered no refutation.

“So what? This doesn’t help her.”

Kannadi released her arms. Her fingernails left little crescent dents in her skin.

She stared at her ceiling.

The scientist in Kannadi fought to helm her train of thought, but the devoted granddaughter pounded on the engine room door, begging to drive it into empathy.

Grandmother had lived a full life, Kannadi told herself. Eighty-seven was a large number, as mammal lifespans went. A good, long life. And what was life anyway? Bodies running on energy. The machine wears down, the fuel runs out, and what is left of a life? What becomes of the memories? Of the experience of a life lived? Where was _that_ recorded, eh? Where were experiences time-stamped? Only in the mind… right?

Kannadi froze.

No. _Experience_ could be reflected in aether. Of course it could! That’s what spiritbond _was_. And an experience with a recorded time… well, there was a word for that, and that word was _memory_.

Were memories also—

Kannadi flew from her seat, knees aching at the turn of speed from zero to desperate.

She stuck her hand under the Manascope and looked in.

It was dizzying. Lines of lines, rivers of rivers, spirals of spirals, all at once, in impossible colors.

Kannadi jerked back from the eyepiece. “No wonder the wretched time-stuff fails to work on bodies,” she said. “Vitality interference.”

She paced a narrow clear path around all her books and tables and assorted papers. Walking helped her think. So did a dialogue.

 _State the facts_ , she advised herself, as her own dialogue partner.

“Very well,” she replied. “Grandmother wants her body made good as new. Good as young. I need _time_ , quite literally – to learn the shape of how my aether expresses a time stamp in a spiritbond. How I shape memory.”

_And then?_

“I _know_ those Allagan items react to memory, so I would need to… to aetherically replicate the precise shape and intensity of an old memory, _inside_ her vital aether, writ large enough for a time-negative aethero-chemical reaction. Aetheric replication is _trivial_ once one knows the shape. That’s what spells _are_.”

She paused her pace.

_I’m proposing to paint an image, with a very fine brush dangling on a yalm-long string, inside of a tornado._

“I am.”

_And I have no idea whether the Oil or Sands could find that image, however large, inside the aetheric riot of a living body._

“I don’t.”

_And no one has even approached anything in the least bit vaguely similar to this in thousands of years._

“It seems that way.”

Kannadi stared blankly over her study.

_Well then._

“Well then.”

_What do I have that’s old enough to study?_

She didn’t have to look far.

She retreated to her bedroom.

A stuffed chocobo, well-worn with old love, stared glassily from its place of honor on her nightstand.

She sat on her bed to retrieve it. Doing so was a deadly mistake for her work ethic. Her body at last demanded the price of uptime.

“Alcibiades… I made it up…”

She wondered dimly what day it was when she collapsed into her pillow.

#

“… And the completed spell avoids aspectation by generating and passing through a Thamassian Fog _before_ encountering the aethero-somatic barrier,” Kannadi explained some twenty hours later.

“It seems you understand it well,” came the older woman’s voice, sarcastically sotto.

“Hardly, Grandmother.” They both spoke softly. The physicians had been dismissed, and the door was shut and locked and warded with silence.

Kharon hadn’t yet touched the breakfast laid on the silver platter across her lap. Her meal was inoffensive grain and greens, not an onze of the sausage she ordered, and Kannadi could tell it offended her. Her face was drawn and gaunt, but at least it wasn’t ashen anymore. To switch one horror for another, her expression radiated hope. Hope in the unproven. It was so very unlike her.

“But it _works_ ,” said Kharon.

“It _may_.”

Kharon gripped her lap tray for emphasis. “Even a _may_ is a revolution. Have you the slightest idea—”

“—How much people would pay, even for a chance? This is Ul’dah, Grandmother. If Lolorito—”

Kharon spat at the name, missing her breakfast.

“If Lolorito,” Kannadi continued, “or _any_ of the rest heard, do you really think they would pay for a chance of being reduced to something as _vulnerable_ as an infant, presuming it doesn’t turn them into dust or wet matter?”

Kharon at last took up a bread roll. “Everyone is dust and wet matter, Kannadi, and I’ve come to the end of its allotted time. What have I to lose?”

“Your _life!_ ” Kannadi punched the mattress two-fisted and leaned hard.

Kharon stared at her, gray eyes to gray eyes.

“Will you condemn yourself to regret and ignorance, Kannadi?”

Kannadi always loved her mother Avani’s invincible abundance of loving support. Kharon, though, her father’s mother, always came off to Kannadi as... more compelling. If Avani was a mountain, Kharon was a glacier. More mobile, to the perceptive. Moving with more foresight, more irresistible shaping strength. More hazardous to navigate. More dangerous. And yet _equally on Kannadi’s side_. Her mother was her strength to weather the ills of the world, but her grandmother was her strength _to weather them_ , actively, to scour and erode and make disappear all that stood in her way.

It was to the benefit of the world that the only thing Kannadi identified as her foe was ignorance.

“I won’t,” said Kannadi.

“Then what more is needed to satisfy you?”

“Specimens. Practice.”

“I will wait no longer.” Kharon bit off a bread chunk and beckoned with her free hand. “Come, at least demonstrate how you _would_ do it.”

Kannadi successfully kept her face straight and stepped forward. She extended her hand.

“First, I… well, I _inject_ a strong memory of mine – an aetheric chronobond wavelength – into your flesh. This may kill you outright.”

“Very well.”

“If it doesn’t, then the injection must not be swept away by your own somatic aether, which would kill you, nor must it interrupt the flow thereof, which would kill you.”

“I see.”

“But to make it perceptible to the Allagan substances _at all_ , the spell weakens the somatic barrier – what is to your aether as skin is to your body.”

“And this means what?”

Kannadi lowered her arm. “I must be quick, lest ambient aether leach in. I suspect you can guess what would transpire if it does.”

“I do. Then?”

Kannadi rubbed her fingers as if dusting sugar. “Then I simply sprinkle the stuff on you. It ought not require forceful persuasion as it does with inanimate objects. I think it may be due to somatic aether galvanizing the differential convection of the aethero-chemical—”

“—And this sprinkling is done _after_ the injection?” Kharon cut her off, lest she recite a dissertation.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Kannadi blinked. Her lips parted.

Her grandmother smelled uncertainty as a shark smells blood.

“Well? Wouldn’t this timestuff have a more stable reaction to your spell if the subject were willingly exposed to it first?”

Kannadi almost rolled her eyes. “This is science, Grandmother. What does will have to do with it?”

“Will is _everything_ , Kanna dear,” Kharon declared. “Will is the capacity for freedom. Will is the border of life. Will is the very soul. And didn’t you tell me that aether could reflect aspects of the soul?”

Kannadi hadn’t said that exactly, but she knew a good point when she heard one. Kharon pressed her advantage.

“And, I guarantee you again, dear, my soul will be in total focus. No ambience will trouble your spell if I allow you in.”

Kannadi, mentally stumbling, secured her footing where she could. “That may possibly be the case. Possibly.”

Kharon moved under her sheets and stood out of bed, trembling at the knees, looming no less ominous for the demure frills and lace of her nightgown. “You’re so close, Kannadi. So very close to confirmation. So close to a truth never seen, never touched.” She spread her arms. “A specimen stands before you, and you will never find another more willing. Its body isn’t much longer for the world. It is a perfect opportunity. How inefficient it would be to waste it.”

Kannadi hesitated. Her grandmother knew everyone’s resonance frequency, and the words rang in Kannadi like a temple bell, muting her internal protests.

But even so…

“Grandmother,” she said, “I was witnessed with you in a locked room which I then warded against sound. If eighty-seven-year-old Kharon Albedo disappears, by either my success or my failure, there will be _inquiries_.”

Kannadi knew how to ring her grandmother too. “Inquiries” implied questions asked by paid-off authority in locked rooms, truth arrived at by tunnels and shade and sharp things. The old woman had made several, in her heyday.

Kharon reluctantly returned to her bed, failing once more to conceal the wobble in her legs.

“Right as always, dear. I will be somewhere less conspicuous for you to cast your spell. Will that do?”

“It should.”

“Then open the door and send for Rasim. And your father. I know better than you how to convince him of anything.”

#

The retainers had remained at the Albedo estate despite their mistress being absent. A mansion didn’t protect or maintain itself, after all. Kharon dismissed them for the evening, waving off their attempts to help her to her bed. She had her son for that. Kannadi shut the door.

Kharon sat in the middle of her couch, dressed lightly in her favorite pantsuit. She’d taken pains to maintain elderly dignity as she had left the Phrontistery in full public view, presenting an image of a declining power to those few gossips lucky enough to see her. She’d taken the scenic route home to maximize their number.

“Even now is not too late,” said Kannadi.

Kharon unbuttoned her sleeves. “I’m sure it isn’t.”

Torrent sat on the opposite couch. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll need to anoint her with the Allagan materials,” said Kannadi. “That should be enough for the spell to find better purchase.”

Kharon dropped her coat on the shiny hardwood floor and began unbuttoning her shirt.

“This is not the time for shoulds, Kannadi. Apply it everywhere.”

Kannadi blanched. Her father’s face matched the expression. “You cannot be serious,” both of them said at once.

“Serious as a non-zero chance of death,” replied Kharon.

Kannadi looked at the ceiling again, _directly_ into the light. “I’ve already had several lifetimes worth of massaging oil into the elderly, thank you.”

“You’re welcome, but I simply can’t reach everywhere, and I’d rather not have a vulnerable patch like that ancient Nymian hero with the bad heel. Besides, it’s your spell, your process, your responsibility. Someone else might get it wrong.” Kharon undid her slacks.

Kannadi rarely showed skin below the neck or wrists. It was definitely not a trait she inherited from her grandmother. And as Kannadi forced her line of sight away from the chandelier, she was reminded of why. Kharon’s skin was definitely her age, wrinkled and well-worn and spotty here and there. Time had thinned her muscle mass and softened her edges, but all of it hung on a frame of iron. It was a form to take pride in, and Kharon certainly did.

For an instant Kannadi wished she were religious so that she could have someone to thank for her grandmother keeping her smallclothes on.

“Get to it,” Kharon said, arms akimbo, unabashed.

Kannadi unstoppered a flask of Oil of Time, tipped in a vial of Sands of Time, and massaged the slick gritty mess into her grandmother’s skin with much care and abundant evasion of the Smallclothes Regions. Kharon took care of those herself, giving Kannadi’s selective blindness a serious workout.

Kannadi slit her eyes open toward the stairs. Torrent was thoroughly engaged in examining the masonry.

As the work continued, the doubt Kannadi had banished began to leak through its restraints. The moment filled the present. Kannadi’s mind, treacherously observant, took in everything. The smell of the oil, the smell of spent firesand from weeks or moons ago, the shade of the light, the subtle squeak of her boots on the floor as she moved in place, the breathing of her father a few yalms away, her _own_ breathing. Everything she was, everything she _wore_ , all the rustle and hush of cloth and hair. The details flooded in, unfiltered.

_Remember this. This is the last moment before you fail._

Kannadi shut her mind again, restoring silence.

She had worked her way down to the floor when Kharon clutched at her sternum and made a choking noise.

Kannadi bolted upright. Kharon only grinned down at her, her skin shining under the chandelier.

“The next one might be genuine. Hurry up.”

Kannadi scowled. “I’m _done_.”

Kharon turned her head to look at her son. He looked back. Kannadi could only guess what passed between them. The old woman finally faced forward, gave Kannadi a studying look, closed her eyes and stood as straight as she could.

“Then complete it.”

Kannadi grasped her staff before doubt could slip back in.

She breathed.

Much later, when she tried to puzzle out what went wrong, she realized she should have washed her hands before casting the spell.

#

The news spread all the faster for being unbelievable. Kharon Albedo was dead, having expired in her home among music and fragrance and loved ones and enviable wealth, with all her affairs in order.

She had requested cremation, and so the funeral just outside the Ossuary featured a silver urn and a life-size portrait – that is, as tall as her, but only portraying her head and shoulders. And so the Silver Giant’s dominant gaze looked down on the small procession of mourners and visitors. So very much like her.

Lord Lolorito even spared a moment to grace the event with his presence on his way to somewhere more important. Kannadi watched him at a distance as he lingered at the urn and portrait, silently smiling victoriously at each.

“Smirking little gremlin,” she said.

“Let him smirk,” came a voice behind Kannadi.

The formal service was over and the assembled had broken into small accretions. Kannadi’s parents were making the rounds, settling business and saying goodbyes. Kannadi loitered near an oil lamp with a specter of death: a very tall woman hidden completely in mourner’s black, veil and all. The lamp only added to the figure’s shadow.

“You could probably drop the veil and give him a heart attack,” Kannadi gently inclined her tone toward suggestion.

“Oh, he doesn’t startle that easily,” the standing shadow said. “Even if I stood by the painting and pointed at him.”

“Perhaps if you carried a scythe.”

“Much too slow a weapon for me, dear.”

“’Dear?’ Do act your age, _Sylbryda_.”

“Advice I could direct at you,” said the tall figure. “ _Do_ act? You sound like a snooty old woman.”

“I’ll grow into it, I’m sure.”

“And you’re certain your spell won’t work on you?”

“I told you before, it’s like trying to see the backs of my eyeballs or bite my own teeth or digest my own stomach. Vital aether just can’t bend itself like that.”

The shadowy dress billowed as Sylbryda crossed her arms. “I still don’t see why it locks this body out of another treatment.”

Lolorito began to move on with his entourage. Kannadi rubbed her thumb over her fingernails, deliberately nonchalant just in case he deigned to glance her way. He didn’t.

“I’d have to spend some time at my desk to elucidate on it in small enough words,” Kannadi began, “but it has to do with vitality convection and our, um, skin contact with the time-reversing medium between. My body added a variable, or perhaps a score of variables. When my spell hit, it dragged you to _my_ age. Another cast of the spell is impossible because it would think you _are_ me, and recursion would keep me out.”

Sylbryda waited until Lolorito and company were well out of sight before replying.

“But you think _for_ the aether of your spells, don’t you?” There was a suggestion of bunched-up eyebrows under the veil. “Can’t you just will it through?”

“Think of it like a bullet, Gran— Sylbryda. Physics does all it can to spoil the shot once you aim and shoot. Any spell cuts through an array of clashing forces just to work, and this is one of those that simply can’t be cast on the caster. It was hard enough to make it work on you. I’m afraid I’ll simply have to enjoy the span of a natural life, and you’ll simply have to content yourself with landing in your upper twenties again. There’s nothing for it. Frankly I must have some sort of natural affinity to this sort of thing to have done it at all.”

A large hand in a black lace glove settled on Kannadi’s shoulder.

“The word for that is ‘genius.’”

“And the word for _that_ is ‘inaccurate.’”

The glove gripped. “Just take a compliment for once. I could not be prouder of you. You’ve given me an extra life.”

Kannadi allowed herself to take the compliment without further contest. She supposed the life _was_ hers to give, since she had invented it.

Sylbryda Sylbrysswyn – Silver Bride, Daughter of Silver Giant. Sylbryda was much too young to be Kharon’s illegitimate daughter, and Torrent was adamant against being anyone’s illegitimate father even as a lie. Thus Kannadi brought up the fact that her father’s brother was conveniently dead. Rasim could just as easily discover and vouch for an illegitimate half-sister.

And outside the Ossuary, Kannadi looked far up at the dark veil, behind which she could see the shape of a smile.

Kannadi returned it.

“Race you to the end, cousin?”


End file.
